Jun Zhang, deputy chief engineer of China Telecom Shanghai., was surprised when this New York reporter called him and his colleagues heroes. They have connected directly to fiber more than 272M homes, twice as much as the entire rest of the world.

There are well over 300M homes passed. 92% of urban homes are covered by fiber. Cities like Shanghai are close to 100% covered. Nearly all the fiber build was done in five years. Prices are relatively low. I am not blind to the authoritarian Chinese state, but I can also admire the achievements.

LTE is approaching 1 billion users, with speeds constantly increasing. China Mobile is among the top four in 5G mmWave plans and the second to embrace Massive MIMO.

Huawei has delivered a testable 50G unit to China Mobile and passed testing at the European Advanced Networking Test Center.

They also offer a 100 gigabit unit with four 25 gigabit devices. A 2 x 50G unit is planned that will be air-cooled.

Verizon has chosen 40 gigabit NG-PON2 for small cell backhaul, but most other carriers are choosing ten gigabits. Verizon has been testing NGPON2 from Calix and Adtran for a year and is now deploying hundreds of 5G small cells.

AT&T is fibering 3M homes/year. Telefonica doing millions in Brazil and most of Spain. France Telecom is well along and nearly all of Portugal covered. Bell Canada recently decided to speed up fiber because cable was killing them.

After a year of political wrangling, state-owned Algérie Telecom has signed a contract with Huawei and is ready to go. The initial contract is 1M homes servable, with a plan to go to 3M. Wireless networks spread incredibly rapidly and now fiber (mostly backbone) is also building.

Cedric Lam on Oct 26 will unveil Go-Long. Google thinks "this new standard can reduce the network operating costs and investment costs." The only information is the press release,

Go-Long is the company's new generation of optical access networks. Described by Google as a new Time and Wavelength Division Multiplexed Super PON (TWDM Super PON), the company believes that this new standard can reduce the network operating costs and investment costs. The company claims that the technology can do this by extending the transmission distance, which can reduce the number of central offices that need to deploy the optical line termination (OLT), significantly reducing equipment, space and power costs.

In other words, they ain't saying anything until the announcement at BBWF.

Publicly owned electric/water utility Acea and government-controlled Enel Open Fiber have apparently reached a deal to bring fiber to every home in Rome in the next few years. By using publicly owned facilities in place, they expect to keep the cost under $400/home.

That figure is about 80% less than Australia's NBN is spending, and probably 30-50% less than AT&T is spending as they fiber 3M homes/year. On the other hand, Telefonica tells me their cost to fiber a home in Spain is similar to $400.

If cable/DSL is good, people won't switch. Kevin McLaughlin's article is unconfirmed but makes sense. Update Someone who knows thinks this is false. The analysis stands whether or not there are cuts today.End update.

I have 200/20 cable; Jennie 50/50 fiber. Both are rock solid and uncongested. For most people that's fine and Google's gigabit isn't worth switching for. Reported result: Cost per new customer blows out the economics. Fiber needs to win ?30% to 50% of the market. That's hard if the existing carriers aren't so bad. LTE by the end of this year will be at a gigabit, (shared) with more antennas likely to allow servicing more fixed customers.

LTE by the end of this year will be at a gigabit, (shared.) Many antenna MIMO will allow servicing more fixed customers even before 5G is ready. Comcast and Cox are promising a gigabit (shared) to half the country within two years.

Verizon planning business customers in 2017. Vincent O’Byrne doesn't believe 10 gig down, 2.5 up is enough for Verizon's future. He has begun trials of 40 gig down, 10 gig up NG-PON2 with Calix and Adtran, with the intent to start purchasing within a year. Boston's new fiber network would be a natural place for them; Verizon would be able to offer 10 gig inexpensively to the giant companies in Boston's financial district. The same gear will probably be natural for Verizon's 2018 test of 5G highband, which will need massive backhaul. mmWaves do not go far and will need cells every few hundred meters.

The same gear will probably be natural for Verizon's 2018 test of 5G highband, which will need massive backhaul. mmWaves do not go far and will need cells every few hundred meters.

Also called TWDM PON, the OLT delivers 4 wavelengths at 10 gig each. Calix says they can bond them, to deliver 40 gig to a customer.

90% cheaper, Adtran believes. NG-PON2 is a high-end design that can use several frequencies for system performance up to 40 gigabits. Verizon intends to deploy to business customers in 2017 and presumably soon for advanced wireless backhaul, including the 5G build for Boston. Unfortunately, tunable lasers for the multiple frequencies are brutally expensive, as much as $1,000.

Kevin Schneider, Jared Cress, and team wondered if a different design and volume manufacturing could bring NG-PON2 closer to mass deployment. Tunable lasers have mostly been used for backbone and high-end gear, like dense wave division multiplexing. That market is less sensitive to price and volume too small for efficient manufacturing. Adtran promises, "An order of magnitude drop in costs."

The new design gained credibility when Verizon made a point of including Adtran in a trial of NG-PON2 with a substantial order expected.

Windstream, Fairpoint watch out. T plans 3M lines of fiber to the premises (including G.fast) each of the next four years, expecting to get to 20-25% of their territory. Some of them will be "out of territory," including some of the ~2M homes they have reached with fiber already. I can't recall either AT&T (almost half the U.S.) or Verizon (about a quarter) expanding this way in the last decade.

AT&T, France Telecom, and Telefonica have discovered that fiber costs are down in favorable locations. Google Kansas City has proven fiber can be profitable, including pulling many customers from AT&T. Fiber in some places can be run for < $500/home; in others, the cost is $4,000-$5,000. It's a great business if you can cherry pick areas with low costs and weak competition.

FT/Orange Spain going to 10M & 14M. Without much publicity, Spain has pulled far ahead of other large nations in fiber homes. The U.S., Italy and France have passed fewer than 25%, Germany and England less than 10%.

MasTec gets $250M contract for 2015, 2016. "We were awarded a contract for approximately a quarter of a billion dollars of 1-gigabit fiber deployment work," CEO Jose Mas announced. Fiber opportunities "are much greater than people quite understand. I think we are in for an incredible cycle in that business" http://bit.ly/1p3ic4t He added "Every time you pick a publication in the telecommunications sector, it’s got a carrier talking about building out 1-gigabit capabilities and what you are seeing is, you’re seeing multiple markets today where you have multiple carriers building in the same markets.... We’re going to be working 1-gigabit work for multiple customers over the next couple of years.

That this probably is AT&T is my conclusion. Mas carefully provided no information on who the customer was, despite being pressed by investment analysts.

Possibly as many as the entire rest of world and soon pulling ahead. Government owned and controlled Chinese telcos are building more fiber home than the entire rest of the world the last few years. The 60M homes connected are not far from the total fiber lines in the entire rest of the world. The OECD includes most of the developed world and counted 56M homes with fiber at the beginning of 2014. There's a fair amount of fiber in places like the UAE so I'm guessing "ROW" remains slightly ahead of China. That won't be true for long.

Dell'oro, one of the top research houses, reports "PON revenue in Q2 reached a record level, with strong growth both in China and the rest of the world." By revenue, 60% of the sales were in China, up 25% over last year. Since Chinese prices are lower, an even larger % of the ports went to the Middle Kingdom. GPON in China is taking over, with EPON sales flat. Strength in China made Huawei and ZTE the world leading vendors.

Attractive real estate come-on. Rent any of 224 apartments in a new real estate development and automatically get connected at a gigabit. Natural prices for a gigabit are $40-$100, Google's $70 +- $30. Gigabit Internet is a very attractive amenity. One proponent believes "fiber to the home increases the value of a $300,000 home by $5,300 to $6,500," (below)

A $40/month discount is a modest marketing concession on apartments that rent for $1100-$1400. Bakersfield is 120 miles and 3 hours by train north of Los Angeles. It's a desert town dependent on imported water and probably a hard place to sell apartments in a drought.

Randall Stephenson literally 10 years ago told the street that AT&T was already installing fiber in all new developments. After all, glass is cheaper than metal. It was the right thing to do even back then but in practice AT&T was doing nothing of the sort. Carriers without high speeds are just leaving themselves open for folks like this to jump in.

George Soros has put £50m behind Hyperoptic, an English company doing the same.